OK, so your next job involves a web UI to control a networked device. Your higher-ups have decided that Node will be used for both front and back end code so they can easily hire web developers with appropriate skills later.

There is 128MB of Flash memory available on the device and the team writing the main device firmware need most of it, but they've managed to reserve 16MB for you to implement your web server and whatever other files are needed for the UI. Your first task is to establish a build process so you can get Node up and running on the box, ready to serve your front end files and provide a supporting API.

By the way, you've never programmed JavaScript before because you're normally a systems programmer writing low-level C and Rust, but there is only a small team at this prototype stage and management want proof of viability before they hire any specialist web developers, so they've asked you to get things started. Off you go.

As the article discusses, everyone is different, and we each bring our own experiences and strengths, and we each have things we haven't done and areas where we're weaker. If your version of setting up NodeJS is running a ready-made install command on a powerful computer and you assumed that everyone else's version of setting up NodeJS was the same, I think perhaps you have just proved the article's point.